Conversations with Scorsese (31 page)

In
The Color of Money
(1986),
Paul Newman returned as an older version of Fast Eddie Felson, whom he played in
Robert Rossen’s memorable
The Hustler
of 1961. This time he was rewarded with a long-delayed, long-deserved Academy Award.

RS:
Really?

MS:
We just did it. We didn’t care that much about our salaries; we wanted to make the movie. But in any event, Mike said, “What do you want done most?” And I
said,
“The Last Temptation of Christ.”
And he smiled. Mike was a genius at what he did, and a person who likes challenges. He said, “I’ll get it made for you.” I didn’t think he would. I didn’t think he could.

Within a few months, right before I signed with Ovitz’s agency, he said, “You know,
Tom Pollock has just become the head of Universal. And he signed a deal with
Garth Drabinsky, of
Cineplex Odeon Theaters from Canada. And they want to make the movie, for a price. What’s the price?” The producer was with me, and she said about six or seven million dollars, whatever it was. Ovitz said, “They want to do it.” I remember, we were on our way to Tahiti to visit with
Marlon Brando. He’d invited me to his island; he wanted to make a movie. So we stopped over in L.A. and had lunch with Pollock and then we flew off to Tahiti. We came back, had another lunch with Pollock. And by that time, the picture was almost a reality. I couldn’t quite believe it. I mean, I was a little nervous the night before I met Pollock. I remember Ovitz called me and said, “How are you feeling? Get in there tomorrow and do your lunch meeting, and give them your idea.” Usually I was burning to tell the story, and I would talk for hours about it. But, sometimes, you know, you’re just down. You just know how long the odds are. I said to Ovitz, “I don’t know. I really don’t know if I can …” He said, “What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re going to go in and you’re going to tell them you’re going to make the best picture ever made. That’s how you do it.” It wasn’t a pep talk, really, but he helped realign my thinking.

RS:
I often find that with something you really want, just before you pitch it, you feel like hell. You doubt yourself.

MS:
Oh! [
Laughs.
] You’ll never do it!

RS:
I don’t want to be here. I don’t even know why I wanted to write this, or to make this.

MS:
Maybe it’s a mistake.

RS:
I mean, it does happen.

MS:
Michael, though, was very unique. He can grab your attention, convince you of practically anything.

RS:
Yes.

MS:
In any event, Pollock was an interesting man. He wanted to make special kinds of films. In two years he made
Temptation of Christ,
Do the Right Thing,
and
Born on the Fourth of July.
Three pretty strong statements.

RS:
Yes. Tom is a very interesting man.

MS:
And
Garth Drabinsky was a very unique character. Do you know him?

RS:
I never met him, but I heard a lot about him. Didn’t he go to jail?

MS:
I think he might have. I don’t know. But that was his moment. He had the biggest theater chain in Canada and America. And the only thing I had to do was go to Vancouver to have a press conference for the film, which is what I did. And go to Toronto for the opening. Garth was really great with us.

RS:
He liked you and respected you.

MS:
A very interesting man. But that’s how
Temptation
got made.

RS:
The Color of Money
made some money, right?

MS:
It made a lot of money.

RS:
And finally it got
Paul Newman his Oscar.

MS:
It did.
Richard Price was nominated, Paul,
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and
Boris Leven. I wrote the
Goodfellas
script with
Nick Pileggi after that and was ready to shoot it, but then I got the money to do
Last Temptation.
We did that and then came back and finished
Goodfellas.

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gets up close and personal with the director.

RS:
What was Newman like to work with?

MS:
It was a great experience. We shaped the story around him, to emphasize those qualities that he had in him, at that point in his life.

RS:
Which were?

MS:
He was a man who was getting older, he understood the nature of it. Fast Eddie Felson was at a point in his life where he had to accept a challenge, go back to what he had done.

He had to stop gambling. He had become a different kind of hustler in a way, selling liquor. But he couldn’t resist the joy of the game. I mean, not just pool, but livening up the game of life, which is the real gamble. But he had also to deal with his limitations as an older person. I wanted it to be a story of an older person who corrupts a young person, like a serpent in the garden of innocence.

RS:
I see.

MS:
The corruption of the younger person is really what I was interested in.
Richard Price, the writer, and Paul formed a companionship working on scenes together, rewriting in rehearsals. The whole film was rehearsed. Paul wanted to rehearse like a play. I had never done a play, so he took me to a rehearsal hall. Basically I blocked the scenes there and the movie was shot very quickly because of that. All the pool games were designed in about two or three days in September and we were way ahead. The rehearsals with the actors were word-for-word from the script. It was a different way of working for me, very different.

RS:
Did you find any constraint in that way of working?

MS:
Not really. Don’t forget, it’s a sequel to a very strong picture. So you can only go so far.

RS:
What was
Tom Cruise like in those days?

MS:
Wonderful. Enthusiastic and, I thought, a damned good actor.

RS:
I think he’s a wonderful actor.

MS:
My mother and father were there—we were shooting in Chicago—and he became good friends with them. Very often, years later, he would go to their apartment on Third Avenue and 19th Street and have dinner in their apartment. He would just go and hang out with them. They loved him.

RS:
I met him two or three times and found him very agreeable.

MS:
I’m telling you, the kid was great. And in
The Color of Money
he was wonderful. And we had a great time. With
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the three of us together working. I used to tell him about
Stanley Kubrick all the time, about
Barry Lyndon
and other movies. Then, of course, he got to work with him in
Eyes Wide Shut.

RS:
I recently was reading a review of some star bio about him in
The New York Times.

MS:
Oh, I stopped reading it.

RS:
It said that maybe Tom Cruise is looking for a father figure, because he had a very bad relationship with his dad.

MS:
It’s interesting he played that part in
Magnolia
then.

RS:
Right. I forgot that.

MS:
You know, about the father. He did a great job in that.

RS:
Yes. Maybe the way he surrendered himself to Kubrick on
Eyes Wide Shut
had something to do with a father figure, too.

MS:
Maybe. But I found him very warm, with a great sense of family.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Frankly, I had a lot of trouble with
The Last Temptation of Christ
when I first saw it.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Well, it’s a long picture.

RS:
I’m a born atheist, I mean.

MS:
Yeah, okay.

RS:
I liked the movie better when I saw it again. I haven’t seen it for some time, though.

MS:
I haven’t, either. I’m going to wait.

RS:
You said that as a kid you loved all those sword-and-sandal epics, like
The Silver Chalice.

MS:
Yes. But they’re bad.

RS:
Perhaps, but I’ve always remembered
The Silver Chalice
because of the way it’s designed.

MS:
Exactly. It’s not a good film, but I love the look of it. We were working class, we didn’t go to theater. We went to movies. That was the first time I saw real theatrical design in a movie. It was fantastic.

RS:
What I was getting at was that somehow you were at least thinking about all those big, corny American biblical epics, very much a part of the 1950s moviegoing experience, when you made
Last Temptation,
even though it was a totally different kind of film.

MS:
Always, yes.

RS:
It’s interesting to me how you got from
The Robe
and
The Silver Chalice
to
Last Temptation.

MS:
Well, by seeing them many times, and by accepting their conventions. And then realizing that the time was right, in the early eighties, for another approach—just to deal with the idea of what Jesus really represented and said and wanted, which was compassion and love. To deal with this head-on. To do it in such a way that I would provoke and engage the audience.

The only way you can do that is to not make your films look and sound like the old biblical films. In those films, the characters were speaking with British accents. The dialogue was beautiful, in some cases, and the films look beautiful. They were pageants. But they had nothing really to do with our lives, where you “make up for your sins at home and in the streets, and not in church.” The transgressions
you have to undo are with people. It’s not about going to church on Sunday. Very often people think, I’ll go to church on Sunday and I’ll be okay. They know Jesus suffered, but they don’t really ask what the suffering was for. I was upset when
Last Temptation
came out and people were claiming it was harming their faith. I never want to injure anybody’s faith. If you have faith, that’s a good thing. Whether I have my faith or not, personally, is a constant struggle. But there’s a difference between faith and evolving in a spiritual way, a big difference.

Faith, a certain kind of faith, is a dangerous thing. If you take faith to heart and it affects in a positive way the way you treat people around you, that’s great. The question of faith also brought me to make
Kundun—
about the
Dalai Lama—the idea of a man or a woman leading a life of spirituality, what that is. The moment I went into preparatory seminary, I was only fifteen or so, I was determined. It was one way of escaping the hard world I was born into, to separate myself, to not have to deal with the moral issues of the streets and what I was involved in there.

But I shocked myself. I couldn’t even take the first minor step toward the spiritual life that I had in mind. I was very disappointed in myself about not being able to take that step.

Jesus lived in the world. He wasn’t in a temple. He wasn’t in church. He was in the world. He was on the street. The picture I wanted to make was about Jesus on Eighth Avenue, something like Pasolini’s
Accattone
[about a pimp attempting to reform, with tragic consequence]. The pimp represents all of us. He’s our mortal condition. He dies. It’s like Jesus when he dies, in a sense.